If you want to see where established financial institutions are putting real money on a public blockchain, look at tokenised funds. These are regulated investment vehicles, mostly holding short-dated US Treasuries, with their ownership records kept on-chain rather than at a traditional transfer agent. They are deliberately dull. That is the point.
As of May 2026, total assets in tokenised funds stand at $28.74 billion globally,1 up from roughly $12.5 billion a year earlier, an increase of around 129%.1
The names doing the building are familiar. Sky’s sUSDS and sDAI yield products together account for $6.59 billion.1 BlackRock’s BUIDL sits at $2.42 billion,1 Franklin Templeton’s BENJI platform at $2.15 billion,1 Ondo Finance at $1.81 billion across two products,1 and Maple Finance at $1.80 billion.1 Centrifuge, Superstate, WisdomTree and Apollo each manage between $100 million and $1.5 billion of on-chain fund assets.1
One chain still anchors the market
The question implicit is whether all this activity makes Ethereum more relevant as an investment proposition. The data is clear on the first half of the answer. Of the $28.74 billion of tokenised fund AUM, $16.85 billion sits on Ethereum, a 58.6% market share.1 The next-largest chain, BNB Chain, has $3.52 billion, or 12.2%.1 Solana is in third with $1.45 billion, or 5.0%.1 Stellar, Arbitrum, Avalanche and zkSync each host between $0.65 and $0.73 billion, with the rest spread across a long tail of newer networks.1
What is worth paying attention to is the pattern within those numbers. Every major issuer is now multi-chain. BlackRock’s BUIDL has expanded from Ethereum-only at launch in 2024 to eight networks today.2 Franklin Templeton’s BENJI runs on Ethereum, Stellar, BSC, Base, Arbitrum and others. Ondo, Maple and Superstate all operate across at least three chains.
Where the load-bearing products go
Yet, the more interesting detail is which chain the asset managers choose for their flagship institutional product, rather than for retail or secondary use cases. The clearest recent example came on 9 May 2026, when BlackRock filed with the SEC to create a tokenised share class for its $7 billion Select Treasury Based Liquidity Fund.3 The fund’s transfer agent, BNY Mellon, will maintain official ownership records on Ethereum using the ERC-20 standard (a standard for Ethereum fungible programmable tokens).
When it comes to register on a chain the legal record of who owns what, the issuer’s choice is Ethereum.
For an investor weighing exposure to Ethereum itself, that distinction matters more than the headline market share. Tokenised funds at $28.7 billion are still a fraction of the global money-market fund universe, which sits in the tens of trillions. If the direction of travel holds, the chain that ends up hosting the legally definitive ownership records of regulated funds is unlikely to be a marginal piece of infrastructure.
The risks are real. Regulation of tokenised securities is still being written in most jurisdictions, and Ethereum’s cost and throughput compete against faster alternatives every day. Multi-chain expansion could continue to dilute any single network’s share. But for advisers asking whether the tokenised-fund story makes Ethereum more relevant, the data does not require a leap of faith. The intermediaries have already answered it.
1Token Terminal, as of 11 May 2026
2BlackRock corporate disclosures and Securitize, as of May 2026
3BlackRock SEC filings dated 9 May 2026